The Hidden

I knew you were crying that day. You felt the shift then, I get it. How many more unforgettable days are between these words?

But I didn’t really know. Isn’t that the beautiful part? If we share a tab and you down a glass we don’t have to rehash all of the scars, dot the eyes for the smiles and stitches.

That’s what I love the most. You don’t have to know anything about me, and you can hide all the parts you don’t want anyone to know either.

I can be anyone this evening. You can too. However much hidden sadness, or trauma, misunderstandings, malfunctions and embarrassing outbursts, flash of angers, choking and writhing about or torture — well, that’s how it always works. We can keep it hush.

Because no one can sustain a perfect presentation their whole life. No one. If they can, well, they’re angels.

But you can for this moment. All that matters is how unpredictability stable I could appear this evening; how many more stock trades it’d take to reserve the helicopter entry.

And it’s worth remembering, sometimes. The same as watching the horse get flogged: you could only wonder whether you’ll avoid the rumored breakdown.

if someone snaps at me, or acts wildly, or I’m teetering a little more, all I know is that there are long sashes of written word, rarely spoken, of everything that happened to this moment, and I won’t force you to understand it. But I’ll wrap it around all of the lesions that seem to leak occasionally. It’s invisible, but it’s the rest of our everything.

All I know is that maybe one day we’ll learn to dissociate so concretely and vividly, and discard it all. Until we’re an entirely different people.

Wouldn’t you want that?